Having decided that I’m building a 2D adventure game engine, it’s time to give it a name and figure out what I want out of it.
Following in the grand tradition of Apple frameworks, I’m calling it AdventureKit.
Whew. That’s enough for today, I think. Time for a beer…
This is part three of a series about adventure game dialogue. Part 1 analyses a simple conversation in The Secret of Monkey Island and part 2 takes a look at the tools that are already available
I part 1 I mentioned that using plain text as a game dialogue format is insane and should not be attempted.
What I didn’t mention was that I know this because I attempted it.
In part 1 of this short series about adventure game dialogue, I used one of the first conversations in The Secret of Monkey Island as an example of the complexities involved in creating dynamic and believable dialogue in an adventure game.
In it, I mentioned that I might have accidentally become distracted by building my own dialogue editor. (If you’ve been following along with my journey into adventure games, you may be noticing a theme.)
Adventure games use a lot of dialogue. Characters are going to have to talk to one another and, unlike books or movies, game dialogue is non-linear and gets complicated quickly.
To see just how complicated it can get, I laid out the initial conversation between Guybrush Threepwood and Mancomb Seepgood in the Scumm Bar early on in The Secret of Monkey Island. This conversation is short enough to be manageable yet still has many of the advanced features of a complex interaction.
My second adventure game prototype is a traditional 2D adventure engine designed to explore whether the following are feasible:
My first adventure game prototype is an ARKit-based app designed to explore the following:
I am in the process of building two prototypes to explore different ways I could build an adventure game on iOS.
The first is an ARKit app. You interact with characters and then they send you off to real world locations to meet other characters, collect items, and solve puzzles.
The second is a more traditional 2D engine using SpriteKit and is heavily inspired by LucasArts’ legendary SCUMM engine. I want to create something modular that could then be used for many years in dozens of games.
When it comes to adventure games, I have been focusing on the past, working my way up to the present day. Up until this point, I have been a player only and therefore haven’t really been paying attention to the current state of things.
As 2018 rolled around and I finally committed to creating my own game, I realised that I had no idea what the current market for adventure games was actually like.
In part 1 I took a high level overview of the game. In this part, I’ll get to why I shipped the game if I recognised that it wasn’t that great. Why not try to make it better first?
It is impossible to over-emphasise how important finishing something is for two important reasons. One, the purely practical one of learning what’s involved. Icons, screenshots, videos, descriptions, metadata, marketing—there’s a lot of work and knowing what’s involved lets me plan better for it in future.
Last week I released my new game, Barista! It’s free and available now on the App Store. Today I take a detailed and critical look at what I made and attempt to extract some actionable lessons from the project.